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28th October 2007

7:39pm: Switching back to a rebellious mode

My blog was frozen for a month, as I've been undergoing some re-evaluation regarding my relationship with, among all, art, creativity and demos. Therefore, many of the topics I wanted to write about felt quite meaningless at the time.

The process is still going on, but let me provide some intermediate results.

For the last seven years, most of my demoscene productions have been for eight-bit platforms, usually the VIC-20. There are quite many aspects I like in this "extreme" demomaking: the technical challenge; the possibility to "break the boundaries" over and over again; the required perfectionism; and of course, the lovely 8-bit esthetics in general.

However, there's another aspect of things -- that of art and expression -- which, in the end, I consider more important than the "engineering" side. So, during all these years, I've spent quite a lot of time for fitting my "artistic visions" in the circuitry of old computers. However, the medium has always felt somewhat clumsy in this respect, because of the continuous consideration of platform limitations and how to overcome them in order to attain a passable result.

Because of these problems, I decided some months ago to split my demowise creativity into two categories: "technical" (8-bit platforms) and "conceptual" (modern computers). This process hasn't been very smooth, however, and every time I attempt democoding with semi-modern peecees I come down to all kinds of philosophical questions and rebellious thoughts, which can often be simplified into "scene sucks".

Yes, the good old "scene sucks". That's what I started my demoscene career with. At that time, I wasn't happy about what demos were like and what they stood for, so I wanted to create something completely different. After some years, however, I found a comfortable niche within the scene, so my rebellion also faded somewhat. Of course, a VIC-20 or an Atari 2600 is somewhat "rebellious" in itself already, so there's little need for additional boosting anymore.

Now that I'm no longer exclusively an 8-bit artist, however, I feel like switching back to this "rebellious mode" once again in order to create something meaningful and not just plain "genre kitsch".

I don't want to create art that is unanimously adored by a marginal subculture but yawned at by everyone else. I'd rather like to create art that is hated by the majority of sceners, but which is considered interesting by many outsiders.

And yes, I'd actually like to forget the whole concept of "scene" for a while, because it tends to build some unwanted boundaries.

Alternative Party 2007 is going to take place in the next weekend. I've been looking at it as an ideal event for releasing something totally different that would mark the beginning of a new era of rebellion. So, be warned.

27th September 2007

2:24pm: Whitney's Catalog on Youtube!

Some months ago, I was reading Gene Youngblood's book "Expanded Cinema" and studying the early history of computer animation.

At that time, I was frustrated that I couldn't find on-line versions of any of the pioneering films anywhere, except for still screenshots and a short Youtube clip of James Whitney's "Lapis" (which already seems to have been removed from the site). I don't really understand why these have been so difficult to find. Is no one interested in the history of weird moving visuals? Are the copyright holders too selfish about their rights? Does some secret organization consider these films too dangerous? I can't find any DVD anthologies either.

Now that I regoogled, however, I noticed that someone named "crystalsculpture2" had uploaded John Whitney's 1961 shortfilm "Catalog" on Youtube. Now, this is something I was looking for on the first place.

I'm quite surprised how much the visuals of "Catalog" resemble a modern-day demoscene demo, despite having been made nearly half a century ago with a mechanical analog computer and not even rendered in real time. Anyway, the purpose of "Catalog" seems to have been to demonstrate what Whitney was able to do with his one-of-a-kind machine, and this may also explain a lot of similarity in the visual esthetics.

I'm still looking for John Stehura's Cibernetik 5.3, however.

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17th September 2007

11:07am: Political update

Last week, Russia announced an environmentally friendly vacuum bomb that can be used for preventing terrorism anytime and everywhere. I'm sure the rest of the world will be very happy about this new invention, which is just as powerful as nuclear weapons but does not pollute the environment at all!

After this announcement, Putin took a step towards dictatorship. Russian prime minister resigns because of "upcoming political changes" and because he wants the president to be in a complete control of the country.

In the European Union, Italians want to promote Orwellian Newspeak. Commissioner Franco Frattini wants to eliminate the words "bomb", "kill", "genocide" and "terrorism" from Internet search engines. The next logical step could be to block all the websites containing these words, and finally, these words could be banned everywhere. "We restrict the freedom of speech just slightly in order to ensure the safety of the European citizens." Oh yeah. I'm just curious why they also want to eliminate one of their most powerful buzzwords ("terrorism") which has been so useful in disabling rational thought on this decade.

German politicans have also recently banned the use of information security software in Germany. Of course, this opens more doors for system-crackers and perhaps spies as well. There also seems to be an urge of expanding this ridiculous ban to the whole union. Is Stasi coming back? Or rather, are the politicians just totally clueless morons who have no idea what they are doing?

In Hungary, the establishment restricts Tomcat of Madwizards' freedom by linking him to terrorism, because he is considered such a dangerous political activist. Of course there is no real evidence, but according to the IRC logs, police seems to have received a direct order for removing Tomcat out of the political scene and making up some evidence if necessary. And of course, "terrorism" is a nice and powerful word once again.

Judging from the recent update on Tempest's website, it seems that Timbaland's lawyers have been able to forge a pretty nice "STFU deal" with Tempest. I'm not going to speculate about the amount of dollars involved, I'm just curiouos about the sparse wording of the statement which clearly seems to indicate a "money talks" deal.

And speaking of big guys and the demoscene, it has been announced today that Al Lowe (of Leisure Suit Larry fame) is coming to visit the Alternative Party in November. We are really living interesting times, say.

The picture on the top is a screenshot from the Spectrum demo "Anger" by Cyberpunks Unity, by the way.

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5th September 2007

11:31am: Czechoslovakian steampunk from the 1950s

Some days ago, Finnish television officially switched from analog to digital broadcasting. This wasn't a big issue for me, as I very seldom watch TV and have actually lived without a single glance for several months already. However, there could be a single valid excuse for me to purchase a digital TV set-top box -- it is the government-funded channel "YLE Teema", which is often able to dig up some quite obscure and interesting material for broadcasting.

Recently, for example, I realized that Teema has a movie slot on Monday evenings where they have, among all, decades-old sci-fi and fantasy movies from the former East Block. Last week, they showed the 1920s Soviet sci-fi classic Aelita, and on upcoming weeks there'll be many space adventure films from the Soviet Union, East Germany and Poland.

While browsing the list of upcoming movies and looking for more information about them, however, I came up to something that really blew me off: the "mystimation" movies from the Czech animator Karel Zeman (1910-1989).

I was able to find some YouTube collages of Zeman's Jules Verne -inspired work:

For some reason, I had managed to completely miss Zeman's work until recently, so seeing these clips was a totally new experience for me. "Mystimation" seems to refer to the combination of live action with painted backgrounds and various animation techniques. In these clips, situated in a "steampunk" milieu, the backgrounds mostly look like 19th century woodcuts (more apparent in the longer video), and the overall visual result appeals to me quite a lot.

There are also excerpts from "Baron Munchhausen", which applies the techniques to a Middle-Eastern milieu with a different visual style, as well as a documentary about Zeman's special effects.

Anyway, I'm now looking for a chance of seeing some of these films in their entirety.

3rd September 2007

12:33pm: Looking in the past to understand the present

Last weekend, I saved some bits from my old 5.25-inch PC floppies. These bits included a lot of "modem stuff", like QWK message packets from BBSes and all kinds of compressed textfiles, but what I found the most interesting were the older files, from around 1988-1991, when I wasn't into BBSes or demos yet. These were mostly text files and BASIC/Pascal programs, but there were also some pictures in CGA-bitmap and vector formats as well as some "articles" made with desktop publishing software.

Yes, I used x86-peecees quite early. Although my active computer history started with the VIC-20 and the C-64 in the mid-1980s, I also got to use my father's 512K Macintosh and 8088-class PC. And in around 1990, I was already a proud owner of my father's old PC. I skipped the usual "Amiga period" between the C-64 and the PC, and I didn't have an Amiga of my own until the 2000s.

Anyway, looking at these old files made me wonder about a couple of questions:

My existing skills, tools and level of motivation somewhat limited my creations back then. So, what would I have created if there had been no limitations?
In the 1990s, I entered the BBS world and the demoscene. How did this shift my focus, desires and mindset, and did I lose something in the process?
How would my present life differ in case I had not been involved with the demoscene at all?

In my early childhood, I used all kinds of available tools for doing something creative. I used to draw a lot with pencils and crayons. I also used an old typewriter to write stories, and a cassette tape recorder for making listenable stories.

In December 1984, when I was just under eight years old, my "arsenal" was expanded by the VIC-20 home computer. Programming in BASIC was the obvious path for exploring this new medium, and I started to experiment with BASIC straight from the beginning.

Some of the earliest things I made with BASIC were animations. That is, print a frame with PRINT, wait a while with an empty FOR:NEXT loop, then print the next frame, etc. As I very early ran out of memory with this technique, the animations hadn't much of a "plot" to speak of. I also wrote a lot of games. Once I got the Super Expander (which had actual graphics and sound commands) I experimented with all kinds of programs that combined abstract graphics with some sounds.

Despite doing a lot with the VIC-20, I continued with the old mediums as well. I started to draw comics. I still recorded stories on the tape in the usual way, although they gradually started to include some computerized sound effects as well. Most of the stuff I created was related to an imaginary world that improved along with the new stories. The world had a lot of friendly space creatures, robots and weird dream-manipulating machines -- even before I started to read science fiction.

One day, my father bought a Macintosh for himself, and I had the chance to use it every now and then. Although there was a BASIC interpreter, the application I used the most was MacPaint, which I regarded as a kind of improved substitute for the paper, pencil and typewriter.

During my PC era some years later, I was doing more or less the same things as before, but with far more elaboration. The stories I wrote were most often "news stories" or some kind of encyclopedic articles about different planets and spaceship classes of my third fictional world, the "Zurs" universe. I tried to use every possible program for something Zurs-related. I used a desktop publishing software, a presentation graphics program and even a database. Yep, I definitely needed to put all the fictional planets and species into a database.

I also tried to adapt some of my written stories into a kind of "movie" or "TV series" format. As I happened to have PC rather than Amiga at the time, these mostly became soundless, subtitled slideshows with some relatively simple effects in between. I dreamed about a more elaborate animating system, as well as putting in some animated 3D for space sequences and some decent sound.

I was also dreaming about several big programming projects, mainly games. I started countless game projects in the 1980s, mostly on the C-64 and the PC, being only able to finish a fraction of them. And yes, some of the ideas were quite closely connected to my sci-fi world. I was dreaming about creating a big Starflight-like crpg/adventure game located in this world, but I never had the motivation to do anything else than the basics for it.

In the early 1990s, I became an active user of modem, and some years later I also accidentally became involved with the demoscene. This provided me with much of the creative motivation I needed at the time, however it also affected my focus and attitude quite a lot.

In the mid-1990s I still considered most demos to be very "superficial". Nice effects, graphics and music and stuff, but not much underlying structure, and nothing very interesting besides the technical excellence. In my previous creative work I had always concentrated quite a lot on the world and the story, and what the demoscene was making mostly looked like "empty shells" to me. However, I visited demoparties for meeting my BBS friends, and I considered this an outstanding excuse for creating and releasing something of my own. So, I started to release humor-based PC textmode demos for the competitions. And of course, these demos had plots and a recurring cast of characters, as I felt that demos should have them in order to fill up the "empty shell".

Naturally, most of the sceners thought that I was making these "jokedemos" only because I wasn't able to do any "real stuff". So, I had a lot of pressure for improving my graphics-programming skills and learning the "demo ways" in order to prove my potential. So, only a year and a half after my first attempt at a demoscene release, I won the 4K intro competition at the Assembly party with my first "serious" release ever. And yes, it had a story, as I really didn't want to "regress" to the "superficial" mainstream demo design despite the serious technical effort.

Nowadays, after a decade, however, I have a feeling that some of this "regression" has already taken place:

Most of my 8-bit stuff is already quite "superficial", focusing on technical merits and being relatively compatible with traditional, "mainstream" demo esthetics.
When I try to think about different demo design concepts, I often feel it difficult to think "out of the box", as I'm always looking for a compromise between the established "demoscene esthetics" and the things I would actually like to use the demo medium for.
Creating anything "worthy" on the PC is difficult as I want to show the same level of technical excellence as on the 8-bit platforms.
I also find it hard to "just create" something from scratch without extensive preliminary technical planning.

So, where would my creative focus be now if I had never been on the demoscene?

As the signs were quite clear from the beginning, I guess I would probably doing some kind of computer animation and perhaps music, but outside the demoscene context and with less focus on the technique. I might also be writing fiction rather than doing anything audiovisual. I could also be actively involved with some big open-source project, perhaps a game. And I also suspect my professional career would be completely different, as I would never have had this demoscene "wildcard" to show to my potential employers. It's also likely that my friend network would be completely different as well.

I've noted that "what-if" scenarios like this are sometimes very good for widening one's view of life from one narrow path into a big grid of different paths. Seeing a whole set of future possibilities via these "alternate timelines" also expands the freedom of choosing what to try next.

1st September 2007

11:52am: Saving the world with a metahuman language

I now feel an immense urge of finally revealing an idea related to automatic processing of natural language. (Yeah, in case you didn't know, I also have a life-long interest in languages and linguistics).

Sometimes, writing text in a natural human language (such as English or Finnish) feels like using a computer assembly language. Here are some reasons why:

Limited "platform support" (need to write several versions of the text to support different groups of people, i.e. different languages and stylistic requirements)
Need for manual optimization (grouping of clauses and sentences, use of synonyms, gluing ideas together without looking gluish, taking care of the rhythm and flow, etc.)
Limited automated checking (for structure, ambiguities, grammar etc.)

Therefore, instead of writing directly in a natural language, I would like to use a metalanguage where I describe the thoughts I want to express, and then run an automatic compiler that translates the "source code" into various natural languages.

This metalanguage would not be like an auxilary constructed language (such as Esperanto or Lojban), but something specifically designed for unambiguously describing "what you want to say".

So, instead of playing around with sentence structures, you would simply define objects and relationships between them, and the compiler would take care of creating a nicely-flowing output from this information. You could even describe typos and ambiguities in the metalanguage if you want to include such quirks in the final text.

The benefits would be immense. Considering that the metalanguage has a a sensible and human-friendly grammar, it would save a lot of mental resources for more obvious purposes. A very important consequence would also be an automatic and accurate translation into any natural language that happens to have a "generator back-end" in the compiler.

Of course, there are existing projects that resemble this idea, such as the Universal Networking Language project of the United Nations. However, UNL is only designed as a "pivot language", or an intermediate representation for machine translation, not as something one would like to write directly. Besides, the UNL project is closed, patented, restricted, and I've also got an impression that it is somewhat stuck and hasn't yet reached a practically usable state.

From what I understand about language technology, I suspect that the analysis phase of machine translation is far more difficult and error-prone than the synthesis phase. The analysis phase includes things such as parsing the source text, constructing a concept tree, deciding between alternative interpretations, guessing what was left out, filling the gaps, etc. -- all this would be avoided if the source text was in an unambiguous metalanguage instead of another natural language.

I feel that a software project like this would be immensely important for the humankind -- far more important than all the various Linux distributions combined. Just imagine the consequences! And do not forget that, despite the illusion the Internet might give you, most of the people living on this planet do not understand English at all. Also remember all the savings of mental resources, all the possibilities to generate documents automatically, all the possible "toy" uses (random text generators, fictional languages), etc. etc.

I've had this idea for a long time and I've also been planning a simple "proof-of-concept" implementation that could be gradually expanded so that it would eventually be useful for, say, publishing this weblog in two languages at a time.

However, I've always felt that an idea of a practically-oriented "metahuman language" is so obvious that there must be an existing project like this among the experts of computational linguistics. So, I've left this kind of ideas for them to process, as they are probably a long way ahead of me.

Still, I'm unable to find any existing projects closely resembling my idea, and I just can't understand why. This could be just perfect for an open collaborative project that actually benefits the humankind. And besides, I believe that, unlike natural language translation projects which tend to get big money and committees before reaching any usable results, this "metahuman language" could begin as a small and simple hobbyist project.

21st August 2007

6:16pm: Diskmags need to be rethought

A new issue of the legendary demoscene diskmag "Zine" was released recently, after a dormancy of nearly 16 years.

I've heard a lot of praise about this new issue, and I'd really like to check it out by myself. However, as the issue has only been released as a Win32 executable with relatively high system requirements (a display chip with shader support, etc.) I still need to wait for the web-readable version, which, hopefully, will be in HTML rather than something like Flash.

Instead of ranting about this particular diskmag I haven't even read, however, I'd like to use this opportunity for summarizing my opinions about the diskmag concept in general.

In my opinion, the diskmag concept ruled in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially for communities that were specific to particular computer platforms, such as the C-64 scene, Amiga scene and the PC scene. The magazines could be distributed easily via disk copying or BBSes, and the custom reader often improved the reading experience with a nice and good-looking interface and background music.

However, now that we live in the 2000s, with broadband Internet access and stuff, I think it is rather pointless to still rely PRIMARILY or EXCLUSIVELY on the tradition of custom-programmed interfaces.

For those who don't get my point, consider these possible use cases:

I hear that there's a good article in a recent diskmag. In order to check it out, I need to download the distribution package, decompress it, start the executable, skip the intros, get accustomed to the interface, find the article and view it. The preliminary procedures will probably take more time than it takes to actually check out the article. And of course, there's always a very good chance that the issue doesn't happen to be compatible with my computer.
I remember an article in a diskmag I'd like to dig up but I don't really remember the exact issue. Therefore, I need to download a dozen candidate issues, decompress them, start them and browse through the article lists. Instead of just using a search engine once.
I hear some vague rumors about a diskmag that might be good, however I'm not really that interested in it, I just want to see what it is like. However, as soon as I notice that getting to read it requires some awkward 1990s-style procedures I lose my interest in the mag altogether.

Some years ago, diskmag authors FINALLY started to realize that it is important to have the content also available in a format that adhers to the Internet-era standards of accessibility rather than to the BBS-era ones. There's still a lot of room for improvement, however.

A big problem is that people only regard the web version as a "poor man's alternative" to the executable rather than a format with its own strengths. Because of this, the web versions are often released much later than the executables, they are poorly indexed and may even be difficult to find on the first place.

What I'd like to see is a true multi-format demoscene magazine where the strengths of the different formats support each other. Something like this, for example:

The executable version provides the "authentic" reading/viewing experience, has a slick interface and maybe experiments with new technical concepts that are not feasible with other formats. It also keeps the diskmag tradition alive.
The paper version can be distributed at real-life events and it can be read almost anywhere. As a physical object it is also very durable, readable after decades and decades. There should also be a PDF version so everyone can print new copies of it.
The website is the one with the potential of gathering the greatest audience. You all know the obvious benefits of web publishing so I'm not going to repeat them here. In addition, the website holding the articles may also include some community functionality that makes it possible to e.g. work collaboratively on a new issue. Yes, even in the wiki sense if you prefer that method.</p>

Of course, the magazine should be good enough that the editors and readers actually care about all of these formats.

Another diskmag-related idea I've had is an archiving project that converts the texts of existing diskmags (and perhaps even the scrollers in old demos) into a common, web-readable format. A project like this would eventually make a huge amount of old material available for indexing, browsing, searching, categorizing, keyword-tagging, cross-linking, reviewing etc.

An archival site like this would work as a common index for all diskmags and would also nicely supplement the existing scene websites. It could even encourage people to do their own research and dig up some obscure "forgotten gems", which, in the best case, could widen people's perspective and encourage them to more out-of-the-box thinking.

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18th August 2007

10:52pm: Reversing the timeline

Recently, I've been listening to some music, mainly tracker chiptunes, in reverse. No, I'm not looking for hidden satanic messages but actually trying to find something that sounds good in both directions. And chiptunes are nice for this as their basic sounds are very simple, so the reversed instruments don't tend to sound as ugly as, say, reversed real-life instruments often do.

I already noticed some years ago that one of my old chipmods, "Vaaksa", sounds surprisingly good in reverse, so I made a palindrome out of it by catenating the original and mirrored sound together. Yesterday, I also did the same thing to two of my other old 1990s chipmods as well as for WOTW's "Intro 101".

I also put the MP3s (or actually MP2s, don't ask) of these four palindromes online at pelulamu.net.

So, why am I bothering on the first place? Well, the usual stuff: new ideas, inspiration, experimentation, deepening my views on how music actually works in the time continuum. If I get inspired enough, I might even create some intentionally symmetric music, perhaps for the "Obscure Music Competition" at the next Alternative Party.

Another related idea is to learn to speak in reverse, as I believe that it would deepen my understanding of how human languages work (and also encourage to think backwards, which could be quite refreshing).

And by the way, speaking of chiptunes, there are some rumors of progress in the legal process concerning the Timbaland/Tempest plagiarism controversy. See Chris Abbott's short post on the Remix64 forums for more information. I'll post a separate entry once there's something substantial to report.

16th August 2007

2:16pm: Deaths

I wasn't planning to blog this but right now it feels that I have to.

Our beloved friend Lauri a.k.a. Xaztur/PWP, was found dead at home on 2007-08-01, just before Assembly. The patologist assumes that the death was caused by alcohol. I planned on putting a memorial message in my Assembly demo but it didn't seem quite appropriate at the time. There was one 4K intro at the party, however (the one by Brainlez Coders), that stated "RIP Lauri".

I personally have quite many memories of Xaztur from the span of last eleven years, starting from a BBS meeting in 1996.

Xaztur's body was cremated on 2007-08-11, however I wasn't able to attend the ceremony due to the long distance and my weekend schedule.

Today I also found out that Joybubbles a.k.a. Joe Engressia, the legendary "blind whistler boy" of the 1970s and the initiator of the phone phreaking scene, also passed away recently, on 2007-08-07, at the age of 58.

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14th August 2007

4:01pm: Can public domain software be proprietary?

According to Wikipedia, Jeskola Buzz is "a proprietary modular software music studio".

"Proprietary", what the hell?

The last time I checked, Buzz was completely freeware (public domain), and the author couldn't care less about who uses it and how.

Following the "proprietary" link in Wikipedia, we come to the following definition: "Proprietary software (also called non-free software) is software with restrictions on using, copying and modifying as enforced by the proprietor." After this statement, the article, with all of its unintentional irony, goes on to talk about Free Software Foundation and the General Public License.

So, in the mindset of a certain branch of Wikipedia zealots:

A completely unrestricted piece of software is "proprietary" just because the author has happened to lose the source code in a disk crash about seven years ago.
However, all software licensed with GPL is always "free" and "non-proprietary", despite the fact that the licence has a lot of restrictions.

Indeed, there seems to be something nasty going on in the minds of these people who accept definitions as Orwellian as these.

I'm not going to rant about the religious dogma of open-source zealots, however. Rather, I'd like to talk about the relationship of the open-source movement, the hacker culture and the demoscene.

First of all, Buzz is a typical piece of demoscene software. It has been released for free distribution and free usage, however the source code is not available, as it has never been customary on the demoscene to release the source. There is some open-source demoscene software, yes, but most of the material is released as plain executables for a single platform.

On the other hand, the availability of source code is among the most important values for "mainstream hackers". If you do not always release the source code, you are evil, secretive and against all the other hacker values as well.

This looks like a profound contradiction between the demoscene and "mainstream hackers" on this matter. However, I don't actually see a big gap at all. Let me explain.

The demoscene has its roots in the software cracker culture of the 1980s. For the crackers, all the software of the world was free for cracking, hacking, modification and distribution, and no one cared about that stupid legal mumbo-jumbo of the adult world.

It can even be said that all microcomputer software was "open-source", at least for the crackers who actively analyzed and modified the binaries and ripped parts of them into their own programs. In most cases, microcomputer programs had been written in an assembler or a machine code monitor to begin with, so the monitor disassembly you looked at indeed was more or less the actual "source code".

Some programs were extensively hacked and modified despite being "closed-source". A good example is Soundtracker, the father of all trackers. Several groups improved it with straight binary-level hacking, some other groups improved these improved versions and so on. Another example is the C-64 Turbo Assembler which is still under "unofficial underground development" although the last official version was released in 1985.

In summary, what we had in the 1980s was something like a "free software culture" but with binary-hacking instead of source-hacking, and with no one caring about licences, laws or copyrights.

However, in the 1990s, as microcomputer software became increasingly complex (high-level languages and stuff) and the demoscene shifted away from its cracker roots, the binary-hacking tradition was lost.

So, in my point of view, there isn't that great a gap at all between demoscene and mainstream hacking, at least if the "core values" are considered. There's just a difference in emphasis.

That is, while the open-source movement emphasizes collaborative development of software, the demoscene is more like a collective quest for new ways of doing things. This, combined with the do-it-yourself attitude, is why it is not considered as important to be able to build on other people's work. If you want to do something from scratch in a different way, you just don't need a large base of existing source code for it.

Some bloggers have been arguing that the demoscene is "secretive" because most of the releases do not include source code. This is just as horribly wrong as it is to call Jeskola Buzz "proprietary" merely due to the lack of source code.

And by the way, despite all this rant, I generally prefer free software and would also like to see a greater percentage of demomaking tools being open-source. I don't care so much about the sources of the demos themselves, however.

12th August 2007

2:30pm: Dreams, Entropy and Unique Creation

Last night I had a dream. Of course, I have dreams every night, but it's only a couple of times per month that I actually care about a dream so much that I decide to write it down in the morning.

I'm not going to repeat the whole dream here (as it is quite complex), I'm just mentioning a single portion, where I am sitting in a restaurant and there are two books written by someone named "Li Tan" on the table. The cover material resembles that of an oldish encyclopedia, giving a feeling of dignity. I don't really remember what the books are exactly about, but it is some scientific topic related to computer science. I consider the books somewhat "sacred" (with some well-thought "truth" in them) and want to have my own copies of them.

I don't remember hearing the name "Li Tan" before I saw it in the dream. However, once I googled the name in the morning, I found quite many people with that name, from 5th century historical figures to computer science researchers. I also found some books written by various "Li Tan"s, the only English-language of which was about digital signal processing. One of the CS Li Tans has been researching systems design and verification of critical embedded systems.

Why am I so interested in following some random clue generated my subconsciousness and trying to find some kind of relevance in it? Isn't this kind of irrational?

The thing is that I like ideas that come from "irrational" sources. Dreams, subconscious associations, misheard words or even random number generators. I'm convinced that following an "irrational" route every now and then makes my life and creation process more interesting and personal, and the paths I choose tend to become more unique, and consequently, more "worthy".

It's a pity that there's no "random" search in Google. However, I often play around with the "random article" link in Wikipedia, looking for new "out-of-the-box" concepts to relate to. I've also been playing associative Wikipedia games (such as, "get a bunch of random articles and create a piece of text that links to every one of them"). I also see a point in divination systems (such as Tarot and I Ching) that randomize a combination from a set of all-around "archetypal" symbols that can be associated with almost anything.

Those who know me may have noticed that I often embrace all kinds of "profound" concepts -- that is, simple and universal ideas with a very low complexity. I often desperately look for "optimal" solutions for problems and apply a nearly scientific perfectionism in order to find them. This definitely sounds like a total diagonal opposite to my appeal for the irrational and "entropy-generating" methods I described earlier.

Anyway, I've been using both of these approaches -- "anti-entropy" and "pro-entropy" -- for a very long time. Still, it's only recently that I've been realizing that they actually form a "yin-yang pair" where the balanced polarities perfect the whole.

I now see the importance of this balance as follows:

As I pictured in my blog two months ago, I see the existence as an infinite sphere of ideas (or "all imaginable things"). The "low-entropy" ideas are near the centre, and the farther away we get from there, the more increase there is in complexity, entropy and randomness.

The life of a single human being is just a single idea on the "outskirts" of the ideasphere. The complexity and randomness of a human life is what makes it worthy for the existence as a whole. That's why it is important to embrace what makes one's life personal and unique.

However, in order to relate one's life to the rest of the existence, it is also important to embrace the "central ideas". There must be some kind of a compass needle that points to the centre -- otherwise, the soul gets lost in the infinite ocean of complexity.

An example:

When making music, it is important both to understand the "universal theory" (low complexity) and to establish a "personal channel" (high complexity).

If we omit the "personal channel" part, we get music that has been made a billion times before. Some of it may be good and powerful, but it does not reflect the "composer's" (or rather, "discoverer's") personality in any way. Such music could just as well have been generated by an algorithm.

On the other hand, if we omit the "universal theory" part, we get chaotic noise instead of music. The noise may very well reflect the artist's inner vision in a very wholesome way, but the resulting piece lacks coherent shape. Consequently, there are very limited means for the audience to relate to the music.

Of course, this principle can be applied to many other areas of life and creativity as well.

9th August 2007

9:35pm: Something about Assembly 2007

Now that it's over a week since this year's Assembly started, I think the time is right for a semi-well-thought summary.

After three years of delay, I finally released a VIC-20 demo that uses the bus trick I described in summer 2003 in my "VIC-20 frontiers" article. Basically, the trick makes the processor put specific bytes on the data bus in a specific order, and these bytes get fetched by the video chip as "bus noise". It's quite nice for the kind of effects where you pick individual lines from a bitmap picture to be displayed on specific scanlines. Y-stretchers, rotating bars, fake-3D twisters, you name it.

On the last day of working on the demo, I noticed that there was some difference in the bus implementation in different individual PAL VIC-20s, resulting certain bit leaks to occur differently. Although I declared in the demo that "the last secrets of the VIC-20 hardware have finally been discovered", it seems that there is still some work to do regarding the differences in different motherboard revisions. It is like doing fundamental science: every time you think you have grasped the ultimate explanation, the reality suddenly becomes more complex.

I brought my own VIC-20 to ensure that the demo actually works correctly in the competition. And I also brought an Atari 2600 for displaying Trilobit's VCS demo in case their own machine fails. This particular 2600 was actually dumpster-dived by my friend Maraz, and it indeed turned out that Trilobit's console had some video problems, so this "abandonware" machine actually became vital for the competition.

I was also on the AssemblyTV with Visy/Trilobit commenting the oldskool demo competition. (And consequently, we were also on the Finnish national TV on some obscure channel no one actually watches). On this commentary session, I mentioned that now that we have the first Assembly demo for a 1970s platform, the next frontier could be the 1960s. Indeed, it would be immensely great for making a PDP-1 demo using an emulator, and then ask the Computer History Museum to run it in the real hardware (as they have the only PDP-1 in the world that still works). A recorded video could then be put in some competition.

Neither PWP or Trilobit won the oldskool demo competition, however. The winner was Aspekt with their NES demo, including effects of the kind I've never seen before on that machine. The members of Aspekt are only around 18-21 years old (the youngest succesful demogroup in Finland), so this is a definitive proof against the usual Assembly organizer mantra "only the old farts can program these things". Actually, I would say that it is much easier to learn democoding on an 8-bit machine than on a bloated API hell of a modern operating system.

I don't know whether the members of Aspekt want to admit it, but the group was formed in the context of a Finnish teenager nerds' programming site called "Ohjelmointiputka". For some years already, I've seen a lot of potential in the users of this site -- not because of the site itself (it was lame, and it still is) but because of their enthusiastic attitude and the talent some of these guys show. And, as nearly all of the very young Finnish demosceners (born 1987 and later) have some background in Ohjelmointiputka, there has to be something worthful in that community.

Another success for Ohjelmointiputka guys at Assembly was the oscilloscope demo Youscope, which ended up third in the short film competition. This demo, using a soundcard to draw images with an oscilloscope, was completely made by Tejeez, a 15-year-old guy who has also been doing some electronics projects as well as 8-bit programming.

I spent quite some time at a demoscene outreach effort called SceneBooth, and this proved to be quite a success in building a link between some of these young people and the established scene. For some years, I've been trying to get some of these people to visit real demoparties or even Boozembly, with limited success; perhaps they have just been afraid to participate in "underground" events like these. However, now that we had SceneBooth, many of the visiting youngsters have decided to attend the next Alternative Party in November.

A pleasant surprise was that one of the Ohjelmointiputka guys I met was only thirteen years old. On IRC I had assumed him to be much older than that, as he seems to know surprisingly much about MOD music and old hardware and has been writing stuff in assembly languages. Now that even most of the newcomers of the demoscene tend to be twenty-something, it is really a healthy sign that some of those who are in the "optimal starting age" also become involved. Also, the more folks of this age range we have, the farther away we are from the "dying subculture" scenario.

One of the problems with this year's Assembly was the uncertainty as to where the common "hang-around areas" were. There was a Boozembly, but the new place wasn't really succesful in my opinion. Also, the so-called "oldskool" area was put on the "gamer floor" this year, which wasn't quite appealing either. As a result, quite many sceners ended up spending their time at the SceneBooth. I'm really looking forward to the possibilities of expanding this concept, perhaps even replacing the "oldskool" area altogether with an expanded SceneBooth at Assembly.

And yes, I'd like to change the name. "Scene" is somewhat vague, and I've been quite sceptical against "scene-centric" thinking anyway. And I'd like to drop the misleading and harmful "oldskool" label as well.

One cannot write a party report like this without mentioning the main demo competition.

As on so many years before, most of the competition was rather boring. For some reason, peecee groups tend to produce a lot of "non-surprising high-quality stuff" for the Assembly competitions. Most of these demos would have been worthy winners on any smaller party, but seeing a dozen "similar" productions in the middle of the night makes you want to have a nap. Also, as the majority of the audience has not got used to watching demos, the competition may seem to them as even more pointless and boring than to someone like myself (with years and years of experience in actually watching this kind of crap.)

The failures of the competition in short: far too little experimentation with new concepts; far too little deviance from the "generic demo style"; far too much dependence on the music and relying on generic abstract visuals. Actually, some of the most memorable entries were "non-scene" ones, such as the fractal-based demo and the one with a massive orchestral soundtrack. I don't say these are technically any good or even worth watching again, but at least they left a memory trail, and that's what counts.

Another thing that irritated me was that Microsoft had bought quite many groups to produce demos for XNA. This also includes some groups known for their 64K intros (Conspiracy), and that's probably why the level of the 64K intro competition was extremely poor. I don't really like the way how all kinds of capitalists interfere with the progress of a more or less "anticommercial" subculture.

There was one entry, however, that saved the show, that is, Lifeforce by ASD. I actually had a hard time deciding how to relate with this demo. On one hand, it felt like a kitschy crowdpleaser with a lot of immensely beautiful but mutually unrelated 3D scenes connected to one another. But on the other hand, I really enjoyed it, and after watching the video capture several times, reading the group's explanation on the symbolism and finding some coherence, I have started to consider Lifeforce as something groundbreaking. That is, it isn't just your average "pseudo-artistic" crowdpleaser that looks deep despite being superficial, but something with an inherent artistic value of its own.

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15th July 2007

12:24pm: Resistor art and other old ghosts

Here's something I recently built with resistors (click the picture for a large version):

And here's a close-up:

Here's a similar picture of yours truly:

And yes, as you probably noticed, these aren't real resistors but virtual ones, rendered with POV-Ray. I didn't even bother making the converter use legal colors for the bands; I just wanted to see a bunch of colorful electronic components (fake or not) making up some bitmap picture.

I already had this idea of "circuit art" some years ago when looking at a circuit board with a lot of resistors, but this is the first time I turned it into reality. Or at least into some kind of simulation thereof.

During my lifetime, I've got a countless number of creative ideas, based on all kinds of mental associations, sudden imaginative flashes and even dreams. Some of the ideas (even some of the very vague ones) have been haunting me for several years, so I've begun to realize that I need to start putting them into a more "concrete" form. Visual still art (both 2D and 3D) could perhaps provide a pretty nice channel for a lot of my "artistic urge".

Also, while charting my mental world for all kinds of possibilities, I've been rediscovering the kinds of creative things I wanted to do with computers before I got into the demoscene. I didn't have much skills back them, but now that I'm more experienced, it could be worthy to start manifesting some of these "childhood dreams". This includes visual art, real-time storylined animation and even games. But that's perhaps worth another story.

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3rd July 2007

1:02pm: The new artforms of the new glorious Space Age

I've been reading the PDF version of a book named Expanded Cinema. This book was written in 1970 by Gene Youngblood and it discusses hot new concepts such as video art, computer art and interactive art.

I find the book intriguing in quite many ways.

First of all, it has some crazy and optimistic visions of the future, some of which seem totally out-of-place from today's standpoint, while some seem surprisingly relevant at least after some mental processing. Some of the stuff reminds me of Erkki Kurenniemi's out-of-this-world prophecies from the same era.

Second, it covers many concepts that are relevant to the demoscene, such as algorithmic generation and experimental visual techniques. As the book was written in the pre-microprocessor era, the discussion of these topics is refreshingly "twisted", conjuring up some unique viewpoints when associated with today's ideas.

Third, it has a lot of stuff about some pioneering works of video and computer art. I still need to actually look into these, at least in order to familiarize myself with the early developments.

This book has provoked quite many thoughts, and I think they are worth separate weblog entries. So, I'll return to them at some later day, once I've processed them well enough.

"Process for displaying a plurality of objects on a video screen", United States Patent 4623147

28th June 2007

11:46am: Someone patented an Atari raster effect!

I'm currently working on some Atari VCS demo effects. I was googling for certain technical specs and I found this:

So, basically, someone, at some point of time, patented the programming technique that makes the Atari VCS 2600 display more sprites per scanline than the video chip officially allows. For some reason, this feels like blasphemy to me, just as if someone had patented DYCP, FLI or sideborder removal on the Commodore 64.

So, what's the deal? I know about silly software patents, such as the one about using exclusive-OR for drawing a cursor. I'm also aware that many demos, especially PC ones, are quite likely to break several patents (both silly and non-silly), and I don't really care about this. There are also many software patents that have much more real potential of being harmful than any of these. So, what's the thing that makes me feel really furious about an obscure VCS raster trick patent?

Perhaps it has something to do with the sense of someone invading your zone, that is, someone "stealing" the highly platform-specific tricks you might very well discover and use some day. Or perhaps it's about the attempt of limiting the freedom of coding on a platform where absolutely everything is considered to be allowed. Or it may just be some feeling about the "holiness" and "purity" of 8-bit platforms. I really can't tell.

But anyway, software patents suck. And many of them suck far more than this one. I was just amazed how this particular patent made me react so strongly.

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15th June 2007

6:36am: Useless junk and how to use it
[Junkpiles at an industrial zone near which I live]

The world is full of junk, and the amount of junk increases exponentially. The sooner a gadget breaks up the better; the more difficult it is to repair it the better. Some manufacturers may talk about the "greenness" of their production process, but this is just a distraction. They mention ecological issues only because they want consumers to keep buying new stuff instead of considering less insane consumption habits instead.

Personally, I've challenged myself to avoid buying new stuff, especially in computing and other electronics. I nearly always buy second-hand instead of first-hand, and whenever possible, I use abandoned and dumpster-dived stuff instead of buying anything. This has actually worked quite well because the world happens to be so full of useful abandoned hardware. I'm writing this with a dumpster-dived peecee, and even some of my 8-bit and console hardware has been dumpster-dived. The only programmable device I've ever bought in a factory condition is my 7-year-old Psion 5mx clone.

I'd like to see more promotion of forms of culture that make use of old and abandoned stuff. Especially old computers and electronics, which are still often regarded as useless and obsolete junk. Some other things, such as cars, clothes and furniture, already have quite popular and well-established recycle-and-do-it-yourself cultures around them, so it is perhaps appropriate to make the general public more aware of similar possibilities around old computers and electronics.

Retrocomputing, demoscene and chiptunes make use of classic computers and consoles in ways that emphasize the in-depth understanding how the hardware works, especially when hacked on the software level. However, these cultures usually concentrate on specific pieces of classic hardware.

Circuit-benders, in contrast, take a nearly opposite approach, doing hardware modifications to quite a lot of electronics, often without even caring about how and why their hacks work. The Finnish Association of Experimental Electronics (Kokeellisen Elektroniikan Seura, Koelse) seems to accept nearly any electronics junk as source material, but they also do some more advanced constructions in addition to "pure" circuit-bending.

I'd actually like to see a "junk-hacking" culture that spans the whole area between these two "polarities": from software to hardware, from deep understanding to random experimentation. I'd particularly like to see unique "hi-tech" gadgets based on random junk; beautiful do-it-yourself devices that show an immense talent in both hardware- and software-oriented crafts and hacking. The above pictures are from Koelse's Flickr gallery and I find them particularly inspiring to look at.

In my opinion, it is important to maintain the disappearing do-it-yourself skills in a world where everything becomes increasingly complex and specialized. Consumers are more and more tied with pre-designed consumption patterns where they are required to buy new things every now and then, and the easy possibilities for deviating from these patterns have been minimized. This increasing level of challenge calls for an increasing number of junk-hackers who want to confront the challenge.

I'd like to finish my entry with a quote from an interview with the Koelse guys (in Finnish, the translation is mine): "We practice the utilization of materials thrown away by others right now, because we like them. The rest will have to do the same once there are no more natural resources left to maintain the current way of living."

13th June 2007

11:31am: Breaking news: Timbaland makes some beats of his own!

I've been regretting the fact that I didn't yet have a blog in January, when the "Timbaland vs demoscene" case suddenly made it to the big news. I did maintain a somewhat popular link list on the topic, yes, but a blog could have been a very good supplement for keeping the audience updated about new stuff. Therefore, once I started my blog, I've been looking for an excuse for a Timbaland-related "hot news" post. And here it comes!

Some days ago, Timbaland was in Germany, arguing with a Croatian guy in a bar after some gig. The discussion was so heated that the Croatian eventually uttered a magical taboo word.

This word caused Timbaland and two other Americans to attack the Croatian. The Croatian was taken to the hospital and Timbaland to the jail.

Right now, the entire WEB 2.0 OF THE FUTURE is defending Timbaland for being a courageous defender of his honor, showing the damned Nazi-German foreigners what happens if you utter a magical taboo word to a true American patriot.

I was actually reading these stupid comments only because I was hoping to find some references (jokes or something) regarding the plagiarism controversy. This would have re-re-rereheated some of the discussion.

However, it seems that the audience has already forgotten the case entirely.

12th June 2007

9:01pm: All Imaginable Things Exist
[Leibniz's medallion celebrating binary numbers as the secret of creation]

According to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, we live in "the best of possible worlds". That is, our world is based on a minimal set of rules producing a maximal amount of "richness". In computational terms, it could be described as a very short computer program that outputs highly complex patterns.

The basic premise of a cosmological hypothesis called Digital Physics is that the whole universe is indeed digital and computable, perhaps something like a cellular automaton. The legendary computing pioneer, Konrad Zuse, was also a pioneer of this idea. And yes, this idea has a relationship with my earlier post about fitting a universe in a 4K intro.

One of my favorite scientists, Jürgen Schmidhuber, goes on to point out that, considering that our universe is computable, the shortest program that computes it is actually the one that computes every possible computable universe (with every possible set of physical constants and laws). Something like this, for example:

  for(n=0;;n++)
  {
    binaryString a = createStringOfZerosWithLength(n)
    do {
       universe = new Universe();
       universe.initializeWithProgram(a);
       universe.start();
    } while(++a); // goes thru all the binary sequences of length n
  }

Assuming that this is the basis of our existence, then it is also the basis of the equally true manifestation of every imaginable universe, every imaginable life experience, every imaginable idea, et cetera. Even every imaginable variation of yourself and your life exists in an infinite number of permutations. So, in short, All Imaginable Things Exist.

What binds all these imaginable things together is not causality, but the fabric of computability, which, for instance, makes it possible to simulate smaller universes within a larger one. In our universe, we use computers to simulate all kinds of virtual worlds such as "games of life", and similarly, our universe is being simulated in an infinite number of larger universes. All of these simulations reflect the same "stand-alone" universe, or an "idea" thereof.

It is quite fashionable nowadays to extend computational concepts into something really big and profound, such as cosmology and metaphysics. However, I see nothing wrong with it - each generation finds its own ways for getting fascinated about the deep questions. And personally, as someone who has been influenced by bits and bytes since childhood, I get quite a lot of kicks from "computerish" philosophies like this.

One of the philosophical aspects I like the most is the relationship of "profoundness" with information-theoretical complexity. That is, the fewer bits it takes to represent an idea (in algorithmic means or otherwise), the more profound the idea is. The most profound of all ideas, of course, is the one at the centre of All-That-Is, the one that cannot be defined by anything else that an empty string (zero bits, no information). Philosophical traditions across the world give different names to this idea: Tao, Logos, Ein Sof, Hen (The One), and so on.

According to the commentators of Yijing (I Ching), in the beginning there is Taiji (T'ai Chi), with no information content whatsoever. Taiji splits into two polarities (yin and yang), both identified by a single bit (or "yao"). Each of these splits in two, collectively creating four different two-yao combinations. The process continues, with each step doubling the number of combinations and increasing their description length by one bit. Short binary strings (especially the 3- and 6-bit combinations) represent all kinds of archetypes that govern All-That-Is.

But anyway, even though we might understand the basic principles behind existence, the infinitely massive infinite infinity that emanates from it is so cosmically vast that it escapes mortal understanding. And besides, that's the way I like it.

1st June 2007

6:55pm: Ancient binary mysticism

All right guys, it is now time for some tinfoil hat material!

Before going forward to the deep stuff, however, I think it is appropriate to dedicate this blog entry for recalling an article I wrote some years ago for the first issue of the [ALT] Magazine.

So, here you are: The Mystery of the Binary.

That'll be all for today.